The appalling “crime of the day” garnering international attention to New York City is the attack on teenage tourists.
This attack epitomizes the reason I warn against visiting our once-great city.
The Big Apple has been destroyed by the policies of criminal-coddling politicians and liberal-leaning judges.
The suspect, Steven Hutcherson, is known to both Metropolitan Transportation Authority police and NYPD as an emotionally disturbed person with 17 prior arrests.
Hutcherson was arrested twice in just the last six months.
The most recent arrest was just last month after Hutcherson threatened someone with a knife.
He pleaded guilty in two other cases, his Nov. 7 and July 24 weapons-possession charges.
He received a 15-day sentence in the first, and the second was a conditional discharge, which occurred at his residence.
He also was issued a temporary restraining order against his victim.
Really, judge!? Conditional discharge?
How about a mandated psych exam and a hospital-inpatient program where this emotionally disturbed person’s meds can be administered in a controlled environment?
This is the conversation that ideologues and policymakers refuse to have.
This offender likely needs daily doses of antipsychotics and antidepressants to simply manage “the voices” and the violent urges he is riddled with.
Yet social justice activists fight against any sort of involuntary treatment, preferring to leave them to suffer on the streets and pretending they don’t exist.
How is this compassion? How is it safe?
The fact that the victims here were teenage tourists hurts the city in other ways.
Think the hotel and tourism industry is thrilled to have this kind of news?
Yet the advocates and Albany won’t be happy until everyone feels unsafe to walk the streets and the subway.
And until tourists visit the United States decide to hit Disney World instead.
As a mother of four beautiful children who has worked in the criminal-justice system for three decades, I have an anxiety attack whenever my kids visit the city I grew up in.
It’s time for some action.
When judges arraign mentally disturbed offenders they should require a 72-hour hold for mental evaluation!
We warned policymakers for years that deinstitutionalization and bail “reform” would be endangering New York’s constituents and global visitors.
Nobody listened, nobody cared.
And now this man who should have received intervention will serve an even longer sentence (or not depending on whether Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg feels like doing his job this time), and two young girls will forever be traumatized as crime victims.
Policymakers should be held accountable.
Michelle Esquenazi is the president of the National Association of Bail Agents, the president of the NYS Bail Association and the CEO of Empire Bail Bonds.
